Audio Post: Shoeless and Shameless

This is a raw and unedited recording of me talking about whatever came to mind and reading my latest newsletter aloud. At the 23 second mark, you can hear my dog, Poppetu-Tooterfish, whine. She is inviting you to sign up for my newsletter, which is more coherent than my verbal rambling!

Enjoy!

---

Links to Things I Mention

• I Said God Damn! Podcast (with hosts Erin and Stacey)
• American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists Cervical Screening Guidelines
• Doc Martens (sadly, the style I mention is no longer available).
•  Erinyes (aka, The Furies)
• Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe by Rictor Norton
• Minibrains grown from human and mouse neurons learn to play Pong
• Guiness Nitrogen Bauble-Thingy Explanation
• Garam Masala
• Virginia Street Photography Law (One, brief explanation)
• Gothic Vault Newsletter
• Aulisyn: A Gothic Sci-Fi Novel
• Bitterhaunt Science Series

---

Transcript

Hi, it’s Erzsebet. Welcome to 2025! I don’t know about you, but I was really glad to see 2024 exit the chat, you know? Like, it was just not a great year for a lot of reasons. Not least of which is I started out the year with four beautiful doggies and I have one now. The other three passed away. Um, I miss them terribly every day.

But. Life goes on and, as it does, this means that I had my annual physical. Yay. For the ladies out there, you know that means that it’s time to put your feet in the stirrups and say, giddy-up! And thinking that was the case, I go into the doctor’s room and the nurse is there and she takes my vitals and I’m taking off my huge winter boots, which are these wonderful, flannel-lined Doc Martens that I just love and could never wear when I lived in Texas… totally fine here in Virginia for the winter.

Anyways, I’m taking off these huge boots, taking off my huge sweater, you know – off goes the coat, off goes the scarf, everything. And the nurse is looking at me like, ‘okay, guess you’re settling in.’ It wasn’t until the end of the whole intro part of how-are-you, how-are-you-doing, any-new-issues, that kind of stuff, and she’s like, well, the doctor’ll be in soon. And I’m like, where’s the stupid little smock you’re supposed to wear which doesn’t actually cover anything, especially since you have to wear it with the opening in the front? She says, “Oh! You’re not due for that this year.”

Look, it used to be, when I was a young thing – it used to be you got it every year. Every year, you got your Pap smear. At some point it became every three years. And I guess at some point during those three years it became five years.

So, I’m sitting there with my shoes off, my sweater off and she hadn’t said anything! She could have said, ‘Hey, you know [laughing], no need to get naked today.’ [laughing] I was like, “I guess it’s good I didn’t take it all off.” And she said, “Whoo, take it all off!” And I was like, “Yah, got any dolla bills?” [laughs]

That’s a long-winded way to say, I guess, wait until they say you need to take off all your thousand layers of winter clothes.

Other than that, I also wanted to just do a quick little advertisement for my own newsletter! The Gothic Vault Newsletter. I send it monthly; it’s just a quick, friendly, ah, tell you what I’m thinkin’ what I’m doin’, kinda like this – certainly much more well-edited, because well, any editing is more than I do for these recordings. [laughs]

So, to give you an idea of what you might get, what you will get, if you sign up to receive my newsletter, which you can do by going to the landing page on my website, erzsebetcarmean.com – and I’ll also tell you the link at that end of this rambling that I’m doing.

But I wanted to go ahead and share with you my most recent newsletter to just give you an idea of what you get.

I’m going to switch over and read that. Hopefully this app doesn’t crash when I do that. Here we go. All right. Can you still hear me? Hopefully.

So here is my Gothic Vault Newsletter, and it begins with…

Hello!

I took the month of December off from writing. A good chunk of the time was spent raking leaves while listening to I Said God Damn (true crime podcast). If each leaf was a dollar, I’d be a multi-billionaire. The rest of the time, I spent reading a ton of books, napping, and hanging out with my husband and friends. It’s been wonderful!

But… I’m ready get back to my writing routine. I’ve got two books in progress: LORIKAT and THRACE. They will join AULISYN, my little weirdo of a dual-timeline novel, in the Bitterhaunt Science series.

The what and the who, you ask? I’ll explain.

Bitterhaunt Science is a series of standalone novels that are connected by theme, not characters. Every book in Bitterhaunt Science is a self-contained, complete story. They are a “series” because the ethical and existential themes are shared. I needed the name of the series to meet three criteria: 

1) to indicate the overall tone of the series; 

2) to evoke the atmospheric ties to Gothic literature;

3) to indicate the genre.

My novels are not happy. They are dark, with bitter outcomes. Gothic novels isolate characters, trapping them in frightening places where reality becomes warped to the point where it is unclear whether it is the place or the character that is haunted. The overarching genre for my series is science fiction, albeit sci-fi in a Gothic mode. I superglued to “bitter” to “haunt” because the two are intertwined in my novels. “Science” I taked on to the series name is there as a non-subtle clue that these books are science fiction. And so Bitterhaunt Science was born.

The titles of my novels are named for female characters who represent dark portents, chaotic strength, and bitter, bitter truth. Aulisyn, Lorikat and Thrace are not the main characters by any standard definition of “main.” They are modern Erinyes, full of righteous fury and not shy of going scorched earth or, in more modern parlance, these angry bitches are going to “nuke it from orbit.” 

What do you think about me wrapping up newsletters with some things I found interesting over the past month? If you like it, let me know. If you hate it, let me know! 

December 2024:  Five Things I Think Are Interesting

1. Guinness cans from the grocery store contain a magic nitrogen bauble-thingy to give it that dense, creamy foam you used to only be able to get at the pub.
2. A sprinkle of garam masala spice adds an interesting dimension to the flavor profile of hot coffee. Two sugars, milk, and a few shakes of garam masala and YUM!
3. It is not against the law (in the state of Virginia, USA) to follow someone in your car and photograph them, provided the person is on a public street. I know this because someone did that to me; I was so creeped out that I looked up the laws. Turns out, in the state of Virginia, it is illegal to step on private property to avoid being hit by a car, but 100% legal to stalk someone in your car because they stepped in your yard to avoid an oncoming pickup truck.
4. Ann Radcliffe, the mother of the Gothic novel, was enormously popular with contemporaneous readers. When she stopped publishing at the height of her popularity, rumor had it that Mrs. Radcliffe was in the madhouse, driven insane by her own novels! This is not entirely false; she did have a major depressive episode, but it was brought on by negative critics, not her novels.
5. Brain organ-ides… organoids, that’s hard to say, brain organoids, or “minibrains,” were taught how to play Pong!

Sidenote: I’ve got a link to this it’s super incredible and a little creepy. Definitely underpins some of my ideas, or some of the themes in my next book. But… that’s not a spoiler, it’s a prediction. I’m rambling.

So. That is the end of the nose – noseletter? [laughs] Newsletter. If you’re so inclined you can sign up or tell your friends to sign up at subscribepage.io slash gotic-gothicvaultnews, Jesus Christ! I cannot speak. subscribepage.io/gothicvaultnews.

All right, guys. I think that’s going to be it for now. I hope you have a great day and rest of the week.

Oh, one more thing… if you sign up for the newsletter, you can get a true ghost story from me, three Gothic-themed desktop or Zoom backgrounds, and a coupon code to get my e-book AULISYN at a discount over there at Smashwords.

Bye!

---

Want to know about a real-life encounter Erzsebet had with the supernatural?
Subscribe to The Gothic Vault Newsletter.